Opinion: Latest government spending deal was necessary but comes with a heavy price

by Boris Epshteyn, Chief Political Analyst

boris_shutdown.00_00_09_24.Still001.jpg

EDITOR'S NOTE: Boris Epshteyn formerly served as a Senior Advisor to the Trump Campaign and served in the White House as Special Assistant to The President and Assistant Communications Director for Surrogate Operations.

WASHINGTON (Sinclair Broadcast Group) - The federal government shut down for the second time in under a month at midnight on Friday.

Thankfully, this shutdown was short. It only lasted about nine hours. Nevertheless, the shutdown represented the mess that the federal budget process has become. It also made our country look bad internationally, as if we can’t get our own house in order.

Think about this, the bipartisan spending deal which ended the short shutdown still only funds the government for six more weeks.

The hope is that Congress gets a long-term budget done by March 23. Who knows if our elected officials can actually achieve this and do so in a way that is financially responsible.

Let’s take a look at this deal itself.

The good is that it lifts the debt ceiling until March 2019. It also provides the military with much-needed financial breathing room. An additional $160 billion is allocated to defense spending over the next two fiscal years. $80 billion is added for disaster relief. Those funds are necessary due to the natural disasters, which hit Texas, Puerto Rico, California and Florida especially hard.

The bad? About $130 billion in non-defense spending is included in this deal. That is the price extracted by the Democrats to keep our military funded.

Here is the bottom line: this latest spending deal was necessary, but it comes at a heavy cost. What America needs is a sensible budget that funds the military and cuts non-defense spending in order to keep our country from sinking deeper into debt.